WASHINGTON, 04 May 2021, (TON): Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have filed papers for the divorce. Analysts say it is a strategic move.

Launched in 2000, the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation one of the largest private philanthropic foundation in the United States with net assets of $43.3 billion (2019), would, however, remain intact.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has become one of the most powerful and influential forces in global public health, spending more than $50 billion over the past two decades to bring a business approach to combating poverty and disease.

The Gates have backed widely praised programs in malaria and polio eradication, child nutrition and vaccines. The foundation last year committed some $1.75 billion to COVID-19 relief.

In a joint petition for dissolution of marriage, the couple asserted their legal union was "irretrievably broken," but said they had reached agreement on how to divide their marital assets. No details of that accord were disclosed in the filing in King County Superior Court in Seattle.

Bill Gates, 65, who co-founded Microsoft Corp, and his spouse, Melinda French Gates, 56, met after she joined the software giant as a product manager, and they dated for a few years before marrying in January 1994 in Hawaii. The divorce petition, which states that the couple have no minor children, comes after the youngest of their three offspring recently turned 18. The official statement from the Gates Foundation said the couple would remain as co-chairs and trustees of the organization.